Press release: "Investigating the Relationships Between Mobility Behaviors and Indicators of Subjective Well-Being Using Smartphone-based Experience Sampling and GPS Tracking"
Dr. Sandrine Müller, Mr. Heinrich Peters (shared first authors), Dr. Sandra Matz, Mr. Wang Weichen, and Dr. Gabriella Harari have recently published their article, “Investigating the Relationships Between Mobility Behaviors and Indicators of Subjective Well-Being Using Smartphone-based Experience Sampling and GPS Tracking” in the European Journal of Personality. In their work, they provide a comprehensive investigation of the associations between different kinds of mobility behaviors (e.g., time spent in transit, number of locations visited, and total distance covered) and several indicators of well-being (e.g., depression, loneliness, and stress). Their results show that mobility behavior is linked to well-being across a day, but also when looking across the entire study period. The study was recently published in the Special Issue on Behavioral Personality Science in the Age of Big Data of the European Journal of Personality.
To examine the links between mobility behaviors and well-being, Dr. Müller and Mr. Peters and colleagues examined questionnaire and GPS data from 2,319 psychology students from a large university in the United States. At the beginning of the study, the researchers collected students’ reports of their general levels of loneliness and depression. Additionally, students used their smartphones to answer questions about their anxiety, affect, stress, and energy four times a day over the course of the next two weeks. One unique aspect of the study is that Global Positioning System (GPS) data were also collected during this time. The GPS data were transformed into several measures of mobility behaviors, which were condensed into three broader types of mobility patterns: distance (behaviors related to the distance a person travelled), entropy (the distribution of time a person spent in different places), and routine (the regularity of a person’s mobility patterns). After linking these mobility patterns to participants’ well-being scores, they found that mobility was related to well-being on the daily level, as well as on the level of an aggregate across the study period. This demonstrates that mobility behavior is not only important for understanding how people feel on that particular day, but may also predict how they feel across a longer time. Generally speaking, distance and entropy specifically regarding the time spent in social places were related to more positive well-being. In contrast, routine behaviors were related to depression and loneliness. Taken together, these findings show that individuals’ mobility behavior may indeed be useful in predicting their well-being.
When asked about the implications of their findings, Dr. Müller said in an interview with the European Journal of Personality: “While it was not something our study was aiming to do, I think it definitely gives ideas for future studies on interventions and real-world applications. Interventions related to behavior or movement or spending time in certain places are very exciting. There’s potential for learning individual patterns and showing that on the days where people go to certain places, they feel better[. By] giving them suggestions to try certain things, [we can] try to make them feel better.”
Correspondence about this study may be addressed to the either of the first authors, Dr. Sandrine Müller or Mr. Heinrich Peters. Dr. Muller can be contacted at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University, US, or via email on sm4658@columbia.edu. Mr. Peters can be contacted at the Columbia Business School, Columbia University, US, or via email on hpeters@gsb.columbia.edu.
The full interview of Dr. Müller and Mr. Peters can be accessed here.